This finely produced volume is a welcome addition to the well-established Clarendon Ancient History series of translations of key ancient historical texts. For the first time in the English language, a translation the Lives of the Ten Orators and the entries on the Attic Orators from Photius’ Bibliotheca and Suda's Lexicon, accompanied by learned yet useable commentaries and notes, are made available to a wider scholarly public.
Whilst scholarship on Attic oratory has witnessed a rapid expansion in the last 30 years, the biographical sources covered in this volume have not attracted the attention they merit. This is evident from this volume's extensive bibliography that includes no more than a dozen scholarly works published between the mid nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries but only a handful of works since then (many of them unpublished Ph.D. dissertations). The relative neglect of the sources in question might be attributed to the fact that one of them is considered spurious (ps.-Plutarch), while the others belong to works of an encyclopaedic character.
The sources presented are intriguing texts providing valuable evidence for a range of biographical, rhetorical, cultural and historical issues. For instance, from ps.-Plutarch's Lives of the Ten Orators we learn a great deal not only about the ways in which Attic Oratory was received in the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods but also about the importance of Classical Athenian history in contemporary, advanced literate education. We gain insights into the meandering journeys that different types of sources took over time and the processes of selectivity and canonisation that lay behind the works that have come down to us. Finally, we garner valuable information about speeches of the Orators which are now lost and aspects of their rhetorical production on which there is no extant evidence. We learn, for example, that both Lysias and Isaeus wrote deliberative speeches (ps.-Plutarch 836b, 839f).
A remarkable type of source included in the Lives of the Ten Orators are inscriptions and monuments that reflect the antiquarian interests of the author. Ps.-Plutarch provides quotations from seven inscriptions, which were included in an earlier biographical work by Caecilius of Calacte. Four of them relate to Antiphon's trial (410 b.c.) and three (appended to the end of the Lives) record honours for Demosthenes, his nephew Demochares and the orator and politician Lycurgus. According to Roisman and Worthington (p. 23) all seven seem to be genuine and thus represent valuable historical evidence. Their mode of presentation (the inscriptions relating to Antiphon are quoted in the text of his Life, whereas the other three appear separately after the Life of Dinarchus) is also revealing in terms of the handling of the sources and the methods of composition. Different monuments (usually bearing inscriptions) are also mentioned (the Life dedicated to Isocrates quotes two dedicatory inscriptions on statues of the orator located in Eleusis and Olympia, also accepted as genuine by Roisman and Worthington).
As Roisman and Worthington explain in their introduction, the Lives of the Ten Orators survived antiquity piggy-backing on the Plutarchan corpus as part of the Moralia, although the latter is not a work by Plutarch (at least not in its entirety). Although the identity of ps.-Plutarch cannot be established with certainty, Roisman and Worthington argue quite convincingly for single rather than composite authorship and place its composition in the ‘first half of the third century’ (p. 14). They suggest that the work post-dates the formation of the Canon of the Ten Attic Orators by about two centuries and place it within the wider cultural context of the Second Sophistic. It is indicative of the author's methodology and priorities that, although he seems aware of Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes (the only Plutarchan life of an Attic orator), he also includes information contradicting it and makes limited use of the actual speeches of the orators.
The second source included in this volume is a collection of the entries on the Attic Orators from Photius’ Bibliotheca, a ninth-century epitomê that has contributed to the preservation (albeit in an abridged form) of many, now lost, works of Greek literature. While it is clear that Photius used ps.-Plutarch's Lives of the Ten Orators, he has not done so slavishly. What is more, he probably consulted further sources and ordered the biographies of individual orators differently (Aeschines and Isocrates get two separate entries, one on personal life and career and another on their speeches and rhetorical style). The entries on the lives of individual orators are generally shorter than those presented in the Lives of the Ten Orators but there is considerable variation in terms of length. The entries on Isaeus and Dinarchus take up about a single page in the volume (including the notes), whereas the entry on Demosthenes is by far the lengthiest and extends to c. thirteen pages.
The third and final source is taken from the Suda, a tenth-century encyclopaedic work covering topics ranging from geography and etymology to historiography and rhetoric. Its brief entries on the Attic Orators range from c. three lines on Andocides to seventeen on the first entry on Demosthenes. Three separate entries are devoted to Demosthenes, one of which initially purports to be about Demosthenes’ namesake father yet goes on to focus on the famous orator himself, another three focus on Antiphon, two on Aeschines and Hyperides, one on each of the other orators of the Canon. This clearly suggests that the compilers of this Byzantine encyclopaedia were using different source material and employed different methodologies. It is telling that three of the orators (Antiphon, Aeschines and Isocrates) are not explicitly identified with the Canon of Ten Orators.
The extensive and detailed introduction will appeal to a wide audience, readers not familiar with Attic oratory but also those not well-versed in the biographical tradition, the history and inter-relationship of these sources. A general introduction to Greek oratory and the Attic orators is followed by a discussion of the Canon of Ten Attic Orators and its formation, brief introductions to the three sources, and sections covering more specific issues pertaining to each of the three works. The most detailed is the section on ps.-Plutarch and his sources including subsections on his use of monuments, the content and structure of his work, and the history of the text. The information provided regarding the text and its problems is more than adequate for a non-specialist audience, and bibliographical references to more specialist works on the topic are provided. The introduction concludes with a section on three fourth-century orators who did not make it into the Canon (Apollodorus, Hegesippus and Demades).
The introduction is followed by the translation and commentary on the Lives of the Ten Orators, while the translations of the entries in Photius and the Suda are complemented by succinct notes with cross-references to the earlier commentary on the Lives. Waterfield's contribution to the overall quality of this volume should not be underestimated; his translation lives up to the high standards that he has set over the past couple of decades as one of the best translators of Classical literature. His translation is smooth and elegant and conveys accurately the character of all three sources.
The commentary is detailed, up to date on the latest scholarship and addresses the needs of the volume's diverse audience. The commentaries on each of the orators are prefaced by a helpful introduction covering the most relevant modern scholarly works and a note on key ancient sources and their problems. Three additional features of the volume that have non-initiated readers in mind are a list of speeches of the Attic Orators, maps of Classical Greece and Athens, and a glossary of key technical terms (the entry on euergetism would have benefited from the inclusion of a few examples of civic-spirited services).
This handy and well-researched volume represents a much-needed contribution to existing scholarship. It will be consulted and appreciated by a broad audience of advanced students and scholars working in the areas of Classical Athenian political and social history, Attic oratory, the history of rhetoric, but also by those interested in the wider intellectual milieus of the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity.
